Mitochondrial Eve and biblical Eve are looking good: criticism of young age is premature

Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) indicates that all women have descended from a single
woman, called mitochondrial Eve.1
This does not prove that she was the only
woman alive at the time, but is consistent with it. High mutation rates
indicate that this ancestor lived at about the time of the biblical Eve as well.

A critic has tried to discredit this creationist case. However, he has nothing more
than special pleading to explain away data that contradict his materialist paradigm.
And he misrepresents the logic of the case—creationists have always used this
as evidence consistent with the Bible, while he misrepresents them as using it as
proof.

Creationists have enthusiastically welcomed the ‘mitochondrial Eve’
hypothesis (i.e. that all modern humans can be traced back to one woman) because
it clearly supports biblical history and contradicts evolutionary scenarios. A few
years ago I reviewed the status of mitochondrial Eve research, showing that the
identification of mitochondrial Eve with biblical Eve was becoming stronger as more
evidence on measured mutation rates accumulated.2

Artist’s impression of a eukaryote cell, showing organelles, including mitochondria that contain DNA

I explained how the mitochondrial Eve findings were in line with biblically based
expectations. While not proving the biblical Eve, they were consistent with her
reality, and were not predicted by evolutionary theory. However, the dates assigned
to mitochondrial Eve had been said by evolutionists to rule out the biblical Eve.

But these dates were based upon ‘molecular clock’ assumptions, which
were calibrated by evolutionary beliefs about when certain evolutionary events occurred,
supposedly millions of years ago. When these assumed rates were checked out against
the real world, preliminary results indicated that the mitochondrial ‘molecular
clock’ was ticking at a much faster rate than evolutionists believed possible.3 That is, it directly ‘challenges’
the evolutionary long-age claim. If correct, it means that mitochondrial Eve lived
6,000 to 6,500 years ago, right in the ballpark for the true ‘mother of all
living’ (Genesis 3:20).

In addition, I explained that these real-time findings also seriously weaken the
case from mitochondrial DNA, which argues (erroneously) that Neandertals are not
true humans.4

Evolutionary counterattack

Not surprisingly, the evolutionary community didn’t allow this empirical support
for the biblical record to stand uncontested. A recent article by one Alec MacAndrew
published on the web has responded to what he calls ‘Challenges to the view
of a 175,000 year date for matrilineal MRCA’. Interestingly, he referred to
two challenges in his attempt to refute the possibility that mitochondrial
Eve is indeed biblical Eve.5

His first ‘point’ is irrelevant

In many ways, MacAndrew’s critique of my article appears to have been written
more for its ‘effect’ on the average reader, trying to make creationists
appear ill-informed or worse.

For one thing, by the end of the snow-storm (snow job?) of ostensibly technical
information, MacAndrew says:

‘They do not understand or they deliberately misrepresent the concept of the
matrilineal Most Recent Common Ancestor [MRCA] which does not point to the only
female human ancestor.’

So the average reader will likely apply that to my article, which MacAndrew’s
article purports to critique. Perhaps MacAndrew hopes that they would have forgotten
that my article explained this very carefully. I said:

‘Evolutionists do not claim, nor can it be fairly stated, that this evidence
proves that there was only one woman alive at any point in the past.’2

It is easy to verify that I spent several paragraphs explaining this further. So
MacAndrew himself has either not understood my article very well or has deliberately
misrepresented it. This impinges on his credibility right from the start.

Another polemical tool (propagandistic) is the way MacAndrew says:

‘… the estimate of 150,000 to 200,000 years for matrilineal MRCA was
called into question not by one challenge (as Carl Wieland suggests) but by two
challenges.’

Implication: Because Carl Wieland hasn’t discussed both ‘challenges’,
he doesn’t know what he is talking about. This argument is absurd on the face
of it—a second challenge makes life even harder for the evolutionist, but
there is not always a need to strengthen a strong argument even further. One is
not obliged to play all one’s aces if one will do! But a careful reader would
see that the first of his two challenges (in fact it is naïve to talk of just
two, anyway—where should we stop?) is totally irrelevant to the single argument
I presented in my paper, which, in a nutshell, is as follows:

Christians who believe in the biblical chronology do not need to be intimidated
by alleged ‘absolute dates’ given to mitochondrial Eve because the dates
are based on calibrations given by evolutionary assumptions. In fact, some measured
mutation rates have given dates, using similar assumptions, consistent with the
biblical chronology.

A careful reader would see that the first of MacAndrew’s two challenges is
all about the cross-linking, which, if confirmed, would lengthen the dates anyway,
so it has nothing to do with the argument in my paper. MacAndrew writes:

‘Note that if recombination does occur, the matrilineal MRCA of humans would
be older than the current estimate of 150,000 to 200,000 years’ [emphasis
in original].

And in any case, as MacAndrew admits, it is at present unconfirmed:

‘At the moment this question has not been settled. The bulk of the opinion
is that recombination does not occur, but there has also been some further evidence
for it.’

So why even mention it? Presumably, it serves his apparent purpose of adding to
the length and ‘scientific impact’ of his paper, despite its being irrelevant.

His response point is special pleading

The second ‘challenge’ (in fact there was, as he indicates, more than
one set of results leading to the same sort of challenging conclusion, if one wants
to be as nitpicky as he was in his critique) is the one to which my article referred.
MacAndrew puts it this way:

‘There have been two papers that have measured unexpectedly high short term
mutational rates in the control region of the mitochondrial DNA. The control region
is a part of the mitochondrial DNA that does not code for proteins. The normally
accepted rate is one mutation every 300 to 600 generations (6,000 to 12,000 years)
and this is calibrated, as Wieland correctly says, by counting mutations in great
ape and human mitochondria and regressing back to the age of their divergence as
determined by fossils dated by radiometric dating.’

It is very significant that MacAndrew admits, both explicitly and implicitly, that
the ‘normally accepted’ mutation rate is calibrated by evolutionary
assumptions.

This is especially apparent by his misleading claim about ‘counting mutations’.
They are counting no such thing, since they haven’t, in this case, seen DNA
mutate (change). Rather, the differences are merely assumed to be mutations,
on the basis of their belief that humans and apes have in fact descended
from a common ancestor. This reminds me of the recent faux pas by the aggressively
antitheistic Richard Dawkins:

‘Evolution has been observed. It’s just that it hasn’t been observed
while it’s happening.’6

Hence, any conclusions on the date of mitochondrial Eve based on such long-age evolutionary
assumptions, regardless of any other ‘challenge’ to the long-age scenario
from observations, are at best only circular.

Misunderstanding the logic

MacAndrew writes:

‘No-one in the science community thought that the Parsons et al.
study supported a matrilineal MRCA of 6,500 years.’

This is an obvious straw man, presumably erected for polemical effect. Not only
did I not imply it, but no-one in their right mind would expect an evolution-dominated
science establishment to accept a date for the MRCA of 6,500 years, no matter what
the data. Instead, they would be motivated to search diligently for alternative
hypotheses and submodels to explain the data which is outside the paradigm. They
can always propose/massage auxiliary hypotheses to protect the core one (in the
evolutionists’ case, naturalism), as philosopher of science Imre
Lakatos showed.7 This is normal—creationists
do the same in similar circumstances, but let’s be straight about what actually
happens in the real world.

There is no reason at all why mitochondrial Eve could not be the biblical Eve.

The sorts of explanations MacAndrew offers for the results that contradict his paradigm
at face value are of course possible, but are at best tentative. And he could, in
any case, only strongly criticize my article based on these explanations if I was
taking an evidentialist approach—i.e. saying that it is the mtDNA data which
prove that Eve lived at that time. But in fact I take an openly presuppositional
approach—my paradigmatic axioms are ‘on the table’ when I say:

‘Since, for example, the creationist’s (true) Eve lived only a few thousand
years ago, the mutational substitutions in mtDNA must have happened at a much faster
rate than assumed by evolutionists to date.’2

In my article I then present evidence which is consistent with that presupposition.
MacAndrew’s ‘explanations’ are essentially of a defensive nature,
to try to show why the data presented in the several papers which found high mutational
rates does not, at face value, support his axioms.

Explaining away contrary evidence

One of MacAndrew’s possible explanations is ‘Statistical variation in
small samples’. But he admits that pooling the data still gives a date which
is five times younger than that based on evolutionary assumptions. He talks of needing
to consider whether mtDNA ‘does in fact mutate at a fixed rate’. Agreed.
But that would simultaneously render vulnerable any argument for long ages
based on mitochondrial substitutions, and so would tend to neutralize opposition
to the possibility of mitochondrial Eve being the biblical Eve. The same criterion
of assessment needs to be applied to the rest of his list of ‘possible explanations’,
which are subsequently delivered as more or less the assured results of ‘subsequent
research’.

Also, it is no surprise to hear him say that RFLP8
analysis is ‘not appropriate’ compared to ‘whole genome sequencing’.
If RFLP had not delivered results that were antiparadigm, would it have been regarded
as inappropriate? The Ingman et al. results fit the paradigm, so they are
‘by definition’ appropriate.

Bottom line: I do not find in his paper any independent yardstick by which one could
say that they were more appropriate, apart from consistency with the paradigmatically
derived longer dates.9

Note also my comments in the original paper emphasizing the need to be aware of
special pleading to ‘explain away’ the results I highlighted. Special
pleading does not mean that one is necessarily wrong, of course, but it helps open
a reader’s philosophical eyes to be aware of it. And I do not think that the
‘burden of proof’ I referred to has in fact been adequately met in the
MacAndrew article, despite his bold attempt to paper over the deficiencies with
a suitably wordy ‘barrage’.

Conclusion

In short, I think MacAndrew is very premature and overconfident when he says that
‘subsequent research has largely resolved’ the challenge presented to
long-age dates for ‘mitochondrial Eve’. Note also that prior to the
6.5-ka challenge, creationist literature was still suggesting that mitochondrial
Eve could well be the biblical Eve. Creationists were not bluffed or intimidated
by the apparent ‘certainty’ of the long dates because of the tenuous
foundation upon which they were erected. The 6.5–ka challenge is really a
way of saying ‘See? How can you deny the Word of God based upon something
which could be overturned so easily by a set of observations?’

But we would recognize all along (and have often stated) that no calculated
date (even one that supports a biblical conclusion) is free of non-provable assumptions
and hence cannot be used to ‘prove’ the Bible. All that MacAndrew has
really done is highlighted this fact, that there are assumptions involved in the
6.5–ka calculations.

If I were an objective outside observer (if there can ever be such a thing), I would
think it reasonable to conclude that it is futile to attach much definitive significance
to any of the ‘dates’ derived from such calculations, because of the
obvious problems and uncertainties. Thus, there is no reason at all why mitochondrial
Eve could not be the biblical Eve, which was my article's main message.

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References

Editor’s note: Though this sentence is technically true, it was a slip and should read ‘all people’, not just ‘women’. However,
since this is a web archive of our Journal, and the slip was in the printed original, this footnote has been inserted instead of modifying. Return to
text.

That does not, of course, preclude the possibility that there may
be one, but his paper did not provide it. Return to text.

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